Arabs

by Anthony Nutting

slight soil to closed pages and flea bite on bottom pages

Genres: Nonfiction, History

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet was a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1945 and 1956. He was a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1954 until he resigned in 1956 in protest against the Suez invasion.

During WW2 he entered the Foreign Service, serving as an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. When France fell, he was assigned to the embassy in Madrid, where he organised escape routes for Allied servicemen caught behind enemy lines from 1940 to 1944. He joined the Embassy in Rome from 1944 to 1945 and was briefly private secretary to Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary.

At the 1945 general election, at 25, Nutting was elected as the MP for Melton in Leicestershire. He served as chairman of the Young Conservatives (1946 - 47) and he was the youngest member of Winston Churchill's Government in the 1950s.

He was made a Privy Councillor in 1954 and he led the British delegation to the United Nations General Assembly and Disarmament Commission in 1954 and 1955. He was an internationalist, an early enthusiast for British membership of the European Economic Community and an Arabist who was a founding member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) in 1967.

In 1954, he negotiated the final steps of the treaty with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt under which British troops withdrew from Suez; so when he discovered the joint British and French invasion plan at a meeting on 14 October 1956, he believed that the mission was mistaken and deceitful. On 31 October, despite attempts by future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to persuade him not to resign, Nutting quit his post as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. He did not give the customary resignation speech in the House of Commons for security reasons, and his unexplained action proved so unpopular that his constituents forced him to give up his seat in Parliament.

Reviews

[Wayne Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was at the University of Akron (1970s), the powers that be determined that to graduate all students had to have at least three quarters of non-Western culture. One of the cultures I chose was Middle Eastern. The two books that we used for texts were The Arabs by Anthony Nutting and Islam by Alfred Guillaume. Author Nutting, a noted Arab scholar, English diplomat, and writer perhaps best remembered for his biography of (T. E.) Lawrence of Arabia, was Minister of State for Foreign Affairs under British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. He resigned his ministerial post in protest against Eden's agreement with France and Israel to attack Nasser's Egypt in 1956 during the Suez incident, so he might be considered somewhat sympathetic to the Arabs. Both Islam and The Arabs contain lots of historical information, but while the former emphasizes religion, the latter focuses primarily on the social and political ramifications.

This is a well written, comprehensive history of the Middle East up to the mid 1960s. After an opening chapter on “The Arab World Before Islam,” Nutter, who is uniquely qualified to interpret the passionate and controversial history of the Arabs, depicts the Arab world through its leaders, great and corrupt, famous and infamous, beginning with the birth of the Prophet in ca. 570/571 A.D., through the eras of Arabian conquest, the Omayyad dynasty in Damascus, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the Moors in Spain, the empire building Saladin, and the Turks, to the overthrow of colonialism and the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hero and prophet of modern Arabism. Again, I must point out that while we’re being told that Islam is a religion of peace, the Journal of International Affairs calls even this book a “bloody chronicle” that “describes the fiery conquests and struggles” of the Islamic Arabs.

[Belal Hossain · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good read not more than that .

[Beorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly informative and detailed biography of the Arab people that deals with the political & military history & events that have shaped at least Arabs from the birth of Islam through to the mid-60s. Obviously there has been a lot to happen since then that could easily fill a second volume!
The subject matter is dealt with in an intriguingly fair minded and in-depth manner though one glaring omission is the complete absence of any mention of the cultural or social history of Arabs - such as food, art, popular movements etc - which is why I felt compelled to knock off a star.

The total abhorrence for paragraphs that was the norm when the book was published can make it fairly hard to keep track of all the twists and turns especially in the more internecine conflicts but that is hardly the authors fault.
Overall, not quite as conclusive a history I was looking for but all the same a very good place to start.

[Ismail]

I do not think the author is neutral, he always implying that Prophet Mohammed was taught by a Monck whom in reality profit Moh'd never met .
Nutting is trying to illustrate a misleading image regarding the Arabs origins. he based his research and reference on limited number of books which were written by orientalists.